Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  Then, as if a light switch had been flipped, the war ended. Across the service, thousands of men and women waited for word on what was to become of them. In the days that followed, technical committees convened as scheduled, their participants ordered to arrive promptly as usual and proceeding without even a mention of what had taken place; in others, officers wondered what they were expected to do now that long-sought peace had arrived.

  The question hovering over Sibert and the service was whether chemical warfare would even exist after the completion of the peace deal. The heads of state would gather in Paris in the spring to deliberate over Europe’s future, its borders, and how to prevent the Continent from collapsing back into war. They would also take up the question of limiting arms, chemical weapons among them. It was an open question as to whether the assembled nations would reinstate the prohibitions on gas warfare that Germany had broken in 1915.

  Such questions didn’t trouble the overjoyed men and women of the Research Division, who held a jubilant celebration on November 18 at a downtown Washington hall. Colonel Burrell announced a major reduction in staff in the Retort. While a sizable staff would remain on the hill for many months, a general demobilization would quickly reduce the division across all areas—clerical, technical, laborers, janitors, and so on. “The writer wishes those of you who are about to leave God-speed and best wishes,” Burrell wrote.

  In Willoughby, too, the breakneck work stopped. On November 11, Nate Simpson had been in his barracks when a friend shouted to him to look out the Mousetrap window. The window had a view of the barbed-wire stockade around the plant and the fields beyond. “There is a girl running across the field and waving her arms like crazy!” the friend yelled. The girl flailing her arms on that midautumn day meant the men of the Mousetrap would be going home.

  Rules and restrictions muzzling Simpson and the rest of the men fell away. Mail censorship ended. The men could finally board the trolley to Cleveland, which had been off-limits. The YMCA set up shop in a mess hall, where they put in a movie projector, athletic equipment, and other diversions to occupy the idle men. While operations didn’t stop completely, they slowed to a crawl as the men awaited word for what was to come next.

  The work of the Mousetrap was already the stuff of legend among the handful of chemists who knew what had taken place behind its fence. To the public, however, the Ben-Hur plant was still a mystery, huffing bilious odors and exuding an air of secrecy. On Thanksgiving Day, the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper rolled out a front-page scoop on lewisite: “City Provides Most Deadly Gas for War.”

  “The most terrible weapon ever forged by man has been placed at the disposal of the United States by American chemists. And it may well be labeled ‘Made in Cleveland,’” the article began. Though parochial and vague, the article set the tone for subsequent reporting on lewisite. The article claimed that it was seventy-two times more deadly than mustard, giving it an almost mystical lethality. Adding to lewisite’s sorcerous aura, the plant had risen “like magic” in just six months. The men laboring within had superhuman endurance—they had “practically been prisoners within the barbed-wire fence, closely guarded, that surrounds the plant,” working twenty-three-hour shifts.

  Several photographs accompanied the article, including one of James Bryant Conant, looking like a solemn schoolboy with his thatch of hair and owlish spectacles. The word “lewisite” didn’t actually appear in the article, nor did the name “Winford Lee Lewis”; instead, the article called the gas “methyl,” the code name the scientists chose because it had no connection to lewisite’s actual ingredients or characteristics.

  The Willoughby Republican, which long ago had been promised an exclusive, had been scooped. The day after Thanksgiving, the Republican published its own story: “Here Is the Big Story of the Great Work of the Soldiers Who Have Been Stationed in Our Midst.” In a morose companion piece, the editors explained that the paper had kept details of the plant secret in exchange for a promise of an exclusive. “We are presenting the story herewith, even with its publication in the Plain Dealer, but not, as we had hoped, in Willoughby first.”

  Harvard professor Elmer Kohler, one of the first men that Manning called upon to assist with the research, congratulated his former pupil Conant just before Christmas, writing that he had heard about the “magnificent success of the Willoughby operation” when he arrived from France a few days earlier. Everyone he had spoken with had credited Conant with being “the absolute boss on the job to which the success was largely due,” Kohler wrote.

  Major Conant returned to Boston for leave beginning on December 7. Colonel Dorsey extended his leave three times, giving the exhausted architect of the Mousetrap most of December to recuperate after the frenetic race in Willoughby. The army discharged Conant two days after the end of his holiday leave, on January 11. At least two job offers rolled in in quick succession—one from B.F. Goodrich, another from the University of Chicago—both of which he turned down so that he could return to his alma mater, Harvard, where he would take up teaching once again in March.

  Simpson was among the men in Willoughby who cheered when an officer posted a list of the first 100 men to be discharged. Another 250 were scheduled to depart soon after, leaving several hundred to attend to the work of shutting down the plant. All of the men who remained expected to leave by the end of January.

  Simpson departed on December 16. He went first to Camp Sherman and then home to Philadelphia after his discharge. Years later, he was sanguine when he wrote about his role at Willoughby. For every soldier in the trenches, ten men like him were needed on the home front. They didn’t question the work they were doing, because they trusted it was in service of the soldiers at the front. “The Chemical Warfare Service ordered ‘Make poison gas!’ This to counter the enemy’s use of chlorine, a poison gas. And so we did.”

  A gray pall hung over Washington as General Sibert arrived at Rauscher’s hall on the evening of December 13, 1918. The weekend before, tens of thousands of government workers had gathered near the White House, singing patriotic songs. Soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital received deliveries of Christmas gifts, and every day, the army discharged another fifteen thousand men. While the crisis had ended, a sense of epochal transformation lingered. President Wilson and his wife were on their way to Paris, where crowds lining the Champs-Élysées would shower the president’s car with violets, and the city council would vote to make him an honorary citizen. With General Pershing at his side, he planned to capitalize on the goodwill to advocate for his plan for a League of Nations uniting America and Europe against future wars.

  While millions would cheer Wilson in the streets of Paris, the celebration at Rauscher’s was a smaller fete. A virtual Who’s Who of the Chemical Warfare Service, the dinner brought together commissioned officers and division chiefs from around the country to salute Sibert and the work of the chemists. The Camp Meigs band banged out the wartime rag “Too Much Mustard,” and the toastmaster kept the program running smoothly.

  The evening wasn’t merely a tribute to Sibert and the service—it was also a public relations maneuver. With the end of censorship, reporters had been invited to the dinner to hear details of the service’s work that had been kept under tight cover for so long. When Sibert rose to speak, his words revealed nothing that the officers in the banquet hall didn’t already know. To the public, however, his comments were revelatory, a recitation of ingenious inventions and marvelous engineering carried out under impossible pressure.

  Sibert didn’t lay bare every secret during the dinner. Lewisite was never mentioned, and a casual listener would not have been able to deduce that gas was manufactured anywhere other than Edgewood. He did make oblique mentions, however, of new and more lethal weapons, and that “other endeavors in the toxic field were just coming into production.” Sibert also revealed that the 1919 war strategy included using gas on a massive scale and that “had the war continued until the spring of 1919 we would have subjected the Germans
to a deluge of toxic substances such as he never dreamed possible when he commenced this type of warfare.”

  Other speakers delved into details about the nature of the service’s work. Colonel Bradley Dewey talked about the new gas masks the service had developed—no doubt glossing over the first failed prototype in 1917—which soldiers could comfortably wear whether fighting or sleeping. Colonel William Walker described Edgewood and the quantities of gas that had come out of its plants—ten tons of mustard to every ton of Germany’s, he claimed. Calling Edgewood one of the most deadly institutions since time began, he startled the audience when he said the number of injuries in the plants may have matched the volume of gas casualties on the front.

  The dinner wasn’t the only overture to the press from the service. At least one reporter, from the Arizona Republican newspaper, was allowed inside Edgewood Arsenal for a tour with Colonel Walker, gaping at the vast complex erected on what had been farmland just twelve months earlier. “What I saw was a city of brick kilns, high chimneys, correlated vats in innumerable series, repeated shot towers, miles of railway, miles of elevated pipe lines, machinery of the finest type and the most perfect installation, housed in concrete and sheet iron, built apparently for permanence,” he wrote. “Chiefly impressive, once one became accustomed to the thought that all this ingenious, costly mechanism was built to generate poison for the sole purpose of horribly maiming and frightfully killing, was the orderliness, the immensity, and the stability of the plant.”

  With the same candor as in his speech at Rauscher’s, Walker spoke openly with the reporter about the gas program, including use of aerial gas bombs. The plan was to drop a ton of mustard gas at a time over fortresses like Metz or Koblenz, using a time fuse to synchronize an explosion several hundred feet over the forts, he said. Mustard being heavier than air, the gas would slowly settle. A single one-ton container could cover an acre or more, he said, “and not one living thing, not even a rat, would live through it.” The targets would include fortified cities where civilians lived because the military installations within made them legitimate targets. He acknowledged that the allies of the United States, principally France and Britain, were not enthusiastic about the idea of aerial gas bombing. The British embraced the idea first, he said. Eventually, the more hesitant French followed suit. “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that we could have wiped out any German city we pleased to single out, and probably several of them, within a few hours of giving the release signal,” he said matter-of-factly.

  As candid as these disclosures were, the service didn’t tell the whole truth. From Sibert’s comments, it would seem that the Chemical Warfare Service had sprung full-grown from the womb of the War Department in July of 1918; the crucial role Van Manning’s Bureau of Mines had played was left out. Manning saw to it that his efforts were not forgotten. Not long after the Rauscher’s dinner, the Bureau of Mines released its annual report outlining the Research Division’s scientific investigations before it was swallowed up by the War Department. George Burrell also took pains to credit his former boss, writing a history of the division for the Journal of Engineering and Industrial Chemistry. “I want to pay a special tribute to Mr. Manning, the man who started the work,” he wrote.

  Those in the know understood Manning’s contribution. Smithsonian Institution secretary Charles Walcott wrote to Manning to praise him for his work and congratulate him on his accomplishments. Walcott, who had been one of Manning’s superiors at the U.S. Geological Survey, couldn’t pass up the chance to take a swipe at the War Department.

  “It was quite natural for the War Department to wish to take the gas work over after you had put it on its feet and the Department had made a most dismal failure on their part up to that time,” he wrote. Manning reciprocated with a gracious thank-you note.

  On December 4, Sibert reported to the adjutant general that the American University Experiment Station would shut down by year’s end. The only work at the station would be completing unfinished research and preparing reports about the investigations. Any future experimental and research work would be handled at Edgewood, the new seat of the Chemical Warfare Service.

  There was another secret of the Chemical Warfare Service that wasn’t discussed. Even as the country celebrated the Armistice, the spy Walter Scheele remained at Jones Point, New York, as if he had been forgotten. Agent Frank O’Donnell, a conscientious agent who had dutifully carried out his responsibilities since the earliest days of Scheele’s confinement, didn’t file a single update about Jones Point between November 7 and 27. When he finally did get caught up on December 2, he submitted one report for all twenty days that read simply “During the entire period nothing of interest to the operation transpired.”

  Scheele presented a quandary that needed to be resolved quietly, outside of public scrutiny. As Scheele himself had angrily pointed out in August, his detention was extrajudicial. He had never been arraigned, he had never been allowed to enter a plea in response to his indictment, and he never had a bond hearing. He inhabited a legal gray area at Jones Point, living a hidden life under a pseudonym, as isolated and trapped as he had been during his exile in Cuba. His name would be back in the headlines soon enough, for reasons that none of his captors could have predicted.

  With the peace, the United States and its allies would finally be forced to confront the moral and ethical questions that had been swept away the moment the Germans opened up the valves on their chlorine tanks. By the Armistice, the Americans had fired about 1,100 tons of gas at the Germans and sent over at least 111 tons in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, including between 25 and 30 tons of mustard. Artillery units used most of the gas—more than 90 percent—while the gas regiment had used the rest. The Germans had used more than 57,000 tons, France had used 28,000 tons, and Britain had used about 15,700 tons. In all, more than 124,000 tons of gas had been used in the chemists’ war.

  Now that the war was over, Sibert and Fries had the task before them of convincing the army, Congress, and the public to maintain a chemical arsenal. Fries appealed to General Pershing to be allowed to return to the United States as soon as possible to begin lobbying the chief of staff and Congress to make the service permanent. Pershing granted Fries’s request and authorized him to bring a staff of nine officers and eight clerks. “I am going with the avowed purpose of trying to have a CWS in the regular Army,” he wrote to Bessie. He began packing immediately, hoping to leave Liverpool, England, on December 7 on a fast steamer, which with luck would allow him to reach his family in Los Angeles by Christmas. He had plenty to be thankful for when he joined his fellow officers for Thanksgiving dinner on November 28, even if his roiling stomach kept him from feasting on the rum omelets and roast goose with chestnut dressing, pumpkin pie, and champagne. He also sent a missive to the men of the service, which Atkisson distributed through the ranks. “Whether the Chemical Warfare Service will be continued in peace remains to be seen. That your work will always be remembered and that it will be the guiding star for such work in any future war… is absolutely certain,” he wrote.

  The next day, Fries finished packing and sent his luggage ahead. He was off to Paris first, then to London. His plan to make it home for Christmas seemed less and less likely; his original ship was delayed, and the one he rescheduled on December 8 was a slower vessel. He also needed to make a stop in Washington to consult with General Sibert, which would delay him more.

  Luck was on his side. The USS Celtic made good time and arrived in New York on December 17, earlier than expected. The ship anchored off Staten Island for the night. In the morning, hundreds of soldiers—about half of them black infantrymen from a segregated regiment—lined the rails as ships up and down the river let loose on their steam whistles. When the patrol boat arrived to greet the ship with newspapers, chocolate, cigars, and cigarettes, the police band aboard played “Home Sweet Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” as the jubilant soldiers yelled and threw their hats into the air. After the ship glided i
nto its berth, Fries sent a telegram to tell Bessie that he had reached New York and was headed to Washington to see Major General Sibert.

  After he saw Sibert, he returned to New York City for his first stateside assignment, which was demobilizing the Gas Defense Plant in New York. It would be many weeks before the shutdown would be complete, and Fries wanted desperately to see Bessie and the children at Christmas. Eighteen months had passed since they had last seen one another, the longest time that the couple had ever been separated during their marriage. He had never met his youngest daughter, who was born after he departed for Europe, and his middle daughter, Barbara, was only ten months old when he left. The general managed to get a seat on a California-bound express train. It took five days to barrel across the country.

  The locomotive pulled into Los Angeles about 5:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve. It was after nightfall, the city ablaze with lights. Fries’s family waited on the platform: Bessie, their son, Stuart, and all three daughters, with Fries’s father holding Barbara in his arms. In the midst of the reunion, Fries reached out to hold Barbara. Frightened, she turned her back on this unrecognizable man in a uniform and gripped her grandfather close. Fries let her be, but after they arrived at a family friend’s house for Christmas Eve supper and adjourned to the living room, Fries watched his daughter carefully sizing him up as the adults talked and laughed, her eyes wide as she took in everything her parents said. After a few minutes, she tugged on Bessie’s skirt and asked uncertainly, “Momma, we like that man, don’t we?”